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February 26, 2013

'Dodger': A review

By Christy McDougall, guest blogger

A few years ago, the world learned, to its great dismay,
that Terry Pratchett has Alzheimer’s. Well, it doesn’t show in one of his
latest books, Dodger.Dodger is a rollicking romp through
Dickensian London, with the occasional interference of some famous historical
personage and occasional discursions into philosophical matters.

Pratchett’s Discworld series of fantasies has been one of my
favorite book series for about ten years now, but I’ve never read one of his non-Discworld
books, until Dodger. But who could
not want to read a book that combines Terry Pratchett’s writing with Charles
Dickens’s world? So I picked it up about two months ago, read half of it in one
sitting, put it down because life (and Christmas) intervened, and didn’t even
think of it again for at least a month, at which point I picked it up again and
finished it in one sitting. Pratchett’s writing is like that, I’ve found. I can
go for months without wanting to read even a book of his I’ve already started,
but once I start reading it again, I can’t put it down.

Dodger’s storyline
is not very Dickensian, since it doesn’t involve 26 different storylines
interwoven in a highly convoluted and entertaining manner, but it contains some
Dickensian motifs: the street boy who makes good; the character with a secret
past; the girl in trouble; the intersection of highly unlikely and dramatic
characters (in Dodger’s case, every
famous person who ever existed at the time of Charles Dickens’s greatest fame);
unexpected heroism from unexpected sources; virtue sitting alongside villainy
(sometimes in the same character); a straightforward look at issues of poverty,
ignorance, and injustice; and extremely peculiar and quirky situations.

A street boy called Dodger rescues a girl on impulse and
finds himself thrown into the middle of an international incident, suddenly
hobnobbing with such personages as Charles Dickens, Disraeli, and Sir Robert
Peel. Though—like all of Pratchett’s main characters—he is thrust or dragged
into his situation without his consent, he also—like all of Pratchett’s main
characters—is sneaky, wily, and intelligent and turns the tables on good guys
and bad guys alike, along the way inspiring a good half dozen of Dickens’s
books and characters and learning new truths about himself and the world.

Like all of Pratchett’s books, Dodger is a jolly good and hilarious read (though, to give fair
warning, extremely bawdy in some places); like many of Dickens’s books, it is a
story that breaks stereotypes, the story of a nobody, a person of no fortune
and no consequence who reveals heroism and virtue transcending his
circumstances. It’s no Dickens, but it’s definitely a Pratchett.